All posts tagged ‘Graphics’

Last week I highlighted the work of a great new development team, Curious Hat, whose focus is to make apps jump off the screen and merge the digital world with our own. Well, I had to give a shout out to another app doing similar things.

CobyPic is by far my favorite coloring app ever. I’m not a fan of apps that simulate drawing or coloring for young children, mainly because I want my mobile devices to do things that you can’t do with a crayon and a piece of paper. Well, CobyPic makes this a reality.

The way you color with CobyPic is, after choosing the picture you want to color in, you have to look around your environment and find an item with a color that you like, then point the camera at it. When you are happy with the color that is in the circle on your screen you hit a button and that becomes the color of part of your picture. The beauty of it is the camera also picks up textures and shading and allows children to create all types of beautiful designs.

You can see how that evolves in the image story presented above.

If you are interested in these new apps that engage the children with the world around them through their mobile device, then CobyPic is definitely one you should check out.

Ever need to explain the life and death of Darth Vader to a friend, but didn’t have time to sit through the 13 hours and 23 minutes of the Star Wars saga with them? Fortunately, some Italian designers have solved that problem with a pictogram that tells someone everything they need to know about the Dark Lord.

The History of Darth Vader (source: H-57)

“The History of Darth Vader” is part of a series of historical pictograms that explain and satirize the life arcs of iconic people in history (real or fictional). The posters — created by H-57, an advertising and design studio located in Milan, Italy — came from a collaboration with the blog-slash-studio First Floor Under.

For the H-57 principles — Matteo Civaschi, Gianmarco Milesi, and Sabrina Di Gregorio — this isn’t the first (nor probably the last) Star Wars themed project. According to the official Star Wars blog, the three are huge fans of the Saga. Last September, H-57 initiated a series of typographic posters to benefit children. Each poster depicts a key character, built exclusively from type fonts.

They printed some as gifts for customers to show H-57’s creativity. Then the images of Darth Vader, Yoda, and a Stormtrooper — using typefaces with names like Bodoni Bold and Helvetica Light Condensed — were posted online and within days went viral.

Create a Monster, a really fun face-making app from Just Fun, is on sale this weekend! I reviewed it this summer and thought it was really great. My kids have really enjoyed making aliens and monsters and it’s one of their favorite apps. This weekend, though, it’s on sale for only 99 cents, so if you’ve got an iPad you should grab it now. The sale runs from today (September 1) through Tuesday (September 6).

But Just Fun has also provided 5 codes for us to give away to our readers. If you’d like to win, simply leave a comment below describing what you would look like as a monster. Enter by 10pm PST tonight, and we’ll pick winners on Friday so that if you didn’t win you still have time to buy it on sale.

If you and your kids like making faces, there’s a fun new app that you’ll really love: Create a Monster by Just Fun pairs an easy-to-learn interface and lots of bizarre parts to help you create oodles of weird creatures. Of course, there are lots of similar apps to this one — Faces iMake is one that we’ve mentioned here on GeekDad that uses real-world objects to make faces, with some intentional limitations built into it. A search for “Create a Monster” in iTunes will actually turn up a lot of other similar-sounding titles, and I’m sure that many of those are also a lot of fun, too.

However, when I first heard about Create a Monster and watched the video on their website, I was immediately drawn to the graphics, which are big and bold and colorful. It also looked really easy. Just Fun kindly granted my request to try out the app, and after fiddling with it briefly I set my kids at it to see what they would make. Continue Reading “Let Your Imagination Go Wild: Create a Monster” »

It was twenty years ago this month, that the first version of Photoshop was released. At the time its toolset was pretty limited and the application wasn’t capable of much. A second version, featuring paths followed later in the year, but it wasn’t until 1994 that version 3 with a new feature called “layers” that Photoshop began to be recognized as a game-changer. Today, it’s difficult to imagine where the Web (or our family Christmas cards) would be without Photoshop.

Photoshop has spawned an entire industry of designers, educators, and plugin developers, not to mention brush creators and a whole generation of hobbyist image wranglers. The mighty app has been responsible for the creation of everything from the photojournalism of presidential debates to hastily layered text for a Lolcats image. The use of Photoshop has been heavily responsible for creating a generation of skeptics, thanks to those wishing to deceive or those simply inept at their jobs.

Let’s all give a hearty “Happy Birthday” to the program that has done so much to inform, entertain and, yes, sometimes fool us. It’s tough to imagine life without Photoshop.

(I’m pretty sure that splash screen is fake. I’ve seen my share of ‘shops in my time and I can just tell. I mean look at the pixels in upper left. You can see where somebody swapped the eye because it doesn’t exactly match the background. It’s a pretty sloppy job, really. Anyone can see that …)